Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [302]
In a short letter dated February 4, Bob Bittman thanked the Lewinsky lawyers for their “proposed modifications to the draft agreement,” informing them that “we must respectfully decline to enter into an agreement on the proposed terms.” Bittman went on to instruct Ginsburg to deliver his client to the OIC offices in Washington on February 9, so that she could be interviewed, at length, in person.
Ginsburg, having already returned to Los Angeles, fired back an angry response at 4:18 P.M., charging the Starr prosecutors with “blatantly reneging on your … grant of immunity.” He gave them a tongue-lashing: “It seems clear that your continued bad faith negotiating techniques represent an effort designed to force Ms. Lewinsky to make false statements implicating the President and others in high crimes and misdemeanors.”
Monica Lewinsky, when Ginsburg called to tell her that OIC had pulled the rug out from under the immunity deal, broke down crying hysterically.
The young Maryland sex-crimes prosecutor used this opportunity to solidify his standing among the hawks in the office. Besides serving a subpoena on Lewinsky to appear before the grand jury in Washington, Bittman also drafted a subpoena to Monica Lewinsky’s mother and a motion to compel her testimony; along with a string of letters to David Kendall, requesting that the president himself appear to give testimony. On February 9 he wrote to Kendall: “Let me make our request specific and clear: the grand jury deserves to know whether the President will respond, favorably, to the invitation.” Kendall hand-delivered a reply on February 13, in which he refused to yield an inch: “The President has the greatest respect for the grand jury. However, under the circumstances, it is impossible to accept this invitation. The situation in Iraq continues to be dangerously volatile, and this has demanded much of the President’s time and attention.” Kendall threw in another zinger, telling the young prosecutor that he had been unable to respond the previous week, because “I was in the process of dealing with prejudicial and false leaks of information” by the Office of In dependent Counsel.
AROUND the world, the reaction to the ongoing Monica Lewinsky story was a mixture of surprise that Bill Clinton had become ensnared in such a tawdry episode, and amazement that Americans were reacting with such righteous indignation. Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, working in a cramped newspaper office in the heart of Paris, had served as the bureau chief for European magazine in London and also covered the Clinton presidency from New York. From Moutet’s perspective, Ken Starr’s never-ending investigation amounted to a form of entertainment for most Europe an audiences. The Paula Jones story, as she saw it, possessed a “fantastic sort of trailer-park ethos that permeated the whole thing.” The Lewinsky affair, dubbed “Le Zippergate” in France, seemed even crazier than fiction. “It looked pretty ridiculous,” said Moutet. Men and women in Europe would repeatedly ask with amusement, “Why doesn’t he have a normal relationship, with a nice, elegant, clever mistress who won’t talk? Can’t he find [a mature woman] who worked with the Democratic National Committee.… Why a twenty-one-year-old intern?”
In France, said Moutet, this sort of event simply wasn’t newsworthy: “We do not talk about politicians’ private lives. President François Mitterrand had lots of mistresses and two regular mistresses, and every journalist in town, myself included, knew all about them, and we had the telephone numbers and we knew about the kids and everything. And we never wrote it. It was perfectly understood that ‘nobody will back you up. The public will hate you to kingdom come. Do not talk about politicians’ private lives.’”
Far-out theories began circulating in Europe concerning